Example embodiments of the inventive concepts described herein relate to content streaming service methods for reducing communication cost and/or systems therefor.
A streaming scheme has become more and more used as a scheme of reproducing sound sources, videos, animations, and the like in real time through the Internet. To perform a streaming operation, a client receives and collects data, and successively sends the data to an application program which converts the data into, for example, sounds or images. If the speed at which the client receives data is too fast, the client may need to store some data in its buffer for simultaneously streaming of the data.
In such streaming scheme, the same content is received (i.e., streamed through the Internet) whenever the content is reproduced, regardless of whether or not the content was previously streamed. For example, after data for content A are received and reproduced, if the content A is desired to be re-reproduced, the same data is re-received (i.e., re-streamed through the Internet). Therefore, content may be produced only in an online state and the same data is re-received (i.e., re-streamed through the Internet) again whenever the content is reproduced, thus increasing communication cost (e.g., data usage or traffic).